IN GOOD FAITH: Why your innocent views on rape upset me

In good faith: why your innocent views on rape upset me

Trigger warning.

Do people ever lose their temper with you when you talk calmly about rape for reasons that completely elude you, because you think you’re being all rational and impartial? This is written in good faith, for your benefit, to help you.

I’m not going to dissect all the nonsense talked this week by the obvious rape apologists; I’m not going to bother spelling out what’s wrong with those two, nor with the idiots explicitly defending them. This blog post is specifically about, and for, the decent, well-meaning, non-rapists, some of whom are feminists and/or allies, who keep saying things about rape that makes my face red in rage, makes me screw my fists up, makes me raise my voice, makes my knees shake, and basically just really upsets me.

This is about the difference between what you think you’re saying, and what I’m actually hearing. I am writing this on the basis that you do actually care that you upset, distress, trigger or hurt me, because you are a Decent Guy and I am a human being.

If you aren’t interested in why you offend me, you must be reading this for some odder motive – like picking a fight. If that’s you, I’m not interested in hearing from you, so save your time, save my time, go for a bike ride or a beer or a meal or something.

PREMPTIVE NOTE FOR ANGRY TROLLS: This blog is not about Julian Assange; it is about the conversations people are having about rape this week (and at other times). That’s it. If you want to talk about him, his innocence or guilt, Wikileaks, American imperialism, or anything else, this blog is the wrong place, so please discuss it elsewhere. There are plenty of places. I have no idea if Assange is guilty of the things he is accused of. It is irrelevant to what I’m talking about here.

SECOND PREMPTIVE NOTE FOR ANGRY TROLLS: This blog is predominantly focusing on male-on-female rape. That’s because the rape apologists this week have been overwhelmingly male, the two idiots in chief have been men, and they have been talking about women being raped. So, sorry, but that’s what I’m addressing today, on this particular occasion, in this particular blog post. That does not mean I don’t care about men being raped. I just do not happen to be writing about it at this particular moment in time.

Okay. Ready? Here are the Calm and Rational comments about rape that make me sometimes a bit angry with you, and why.

Defining rape on rapists’ terms, not survivors

“I know a Decent Guy, who isn’t a rapist, because he’s a Decent Guy and rapists aren’t Decent Guys. And even though he’s a Decent Guy, I can actually conceive of this Decent Non-Rapist doing X. Therefore X shouldn’t really be considered as rape, because Decent Guys who Are Not Rapists do X” is more or less the thought process I’m talking about here. Imagine if we did that with murders. “This guy killed his wife because she slept with his brother, but I can imagine someone I know and admire actually ending up in that situation, so on the basis that this person isn’t a murderer, because murderers aren’t like that, but he might kill his wife if she slept with someone else, killing your wife isn’t actually murder.”

Ridiculous, no? Surely the thought process for other crimes is:“X is murder/rape and therefore people who do X, even if I like them, share packets of peanuts with them, find them funny, admire them, empathise with them, or respect the organisation they founded, or even love them, are, if found guilty of doing X, murderers/rapists.”

Why this makes me so angry

You think this is hard to confront? Rape victims deal with it all the time. Most rapists are someone the survivor knows. If you find it hard to imagine that some legendary figure you’ve never even met could possibly also be a rapist, imagine having to confront the idea that the father of your children is a rapist. Or your husband of ten years. Or a family member. Or your boyfriend. Or a trusted adult, when you’re still a child. Imagine having to confront the fact that the person you love, a person who may, actually, in their own way, love you, too, has still actually chosen to rape you, and is actually a rapist.

If you find it so difficult to imagine that anyone you know or have heard of is a rapist that you start redefining the word to accommodate it, that’s an enormous privilege. It means you have probably never been raped by someone you love, or trust, or admire, feel inferior to, or depend on.

Another reason this really flips me out is that with a few of you, this can feel kind of like you believe rape is some sort of semantic legal distinction, that people call something rape for the sake of it. It’s as if you think, hey, if we call it something else, if we prove that, because of some random technicality, that the term is not applicable, that all is hunky dory. But whatever word you apply to it, being penetrated against your will is traumatic, distressing, painful, and horrific. Whatever you call it, you still should recognise how wrong it is, and recognise that people deserve protection from it. In other words, rape is, rightly, defined in terms of the detrimental impact it has on the victim’s actual life, not the detrimental impact it might have on some hypothetical man’s chances of getting laid.

“Yeah but if it was rape then why would she…”

You’re trying to be totally rational, here; trying to see it from both sides. But, come on, if it was rape, why would she see him again? If it was rape, why did she send him a text message? She says she was raped but then, she does somehow manage to go out partying all the time, doesn’t she? That’s not how rape victims are supposed to behave. You’ve seen films and read stories and even heard from other women who were raped and they all just hide indoors forever. They never have good sex ever again. They certainly never dare to have kinky sex again. This alleged victim, the cheek of it, she seems to be carrying on with her life the same as usual! What a nerve! She even sleeps around sometimes! And she wears slutty dresses!

Oh, and you know what else? She defends him. She says maybe he didn’t mean it, she says he’s probably sorry. She says she loves him. She says maybe it wasn’t rape because maybe he didn’t know he was doing anything wrong when she held her down. She said she didn’t remember it but suddenly she remembers it. She says she’s too traumatised to talk about it but she writes about it all the time! (Yeah, hi.) She didn’t report it for ages. Why would you not want your rapist brought to justice as soon as possible, if it was all so bad?

Or perhaps you’re weighing up what she did leading up to the attack. If she didn’t want to have sex with him, why did she go home with him at all? Why did she drink so much? What did she expect? She was flirting with him, she obviously felt safe, that doesn’t exactly sound like he’s a rapist to me. And why would she sleep with him before if she doesn’t like having sex with him? Why would she sleep with him the night before, then change her mind the next day? No, looking at all these straight-forward, impartial facts – just trying to see it from both sides, and be fair to the guy – to you, it simply doesn’t add up.

Why this makes me so angry

Unless you have been raped then you have no idea what rape victims do and don’t do. Even if you have, people are different, and rape, it won’t surprise you to learn, is an extremely personal thing. People process it in different ways, at different times. There’s no instruction manual for coping with it.

You know what else? There is no obligation on us to modify our behaviour in any way whatsoever. None. There’s almost an implication to some of this thinking that you expect us to have “learned our lesson,” or “be sorry.” Perhaps that’s hardly surprising when everyone is bombarded with messages that say “don’t get raped” instead of “don’t rape,” but that doesn’t make it less upsetting to be told it.

There are dozens, even hundreds of answers, to all the above questions, by the way. Sometimes you don’t know that this horrific thing that happened to you is actually rape. You know why? Because of the people who keep saying all of this stuff I’m writing about. They tell us the word means something else, and we have no right to be traumatised if we wake up to find a boyfriend in us who says he’s very sorry but he can’t stop now, or if we drunkenly flirt with someone who then won’t take no for an answer. Sometimes we forgive or pity the guy who rapes us – have you never heard of an abusive relationship? Sometimes we don’t report it for a long time, or ever, because we don’t realise the rights we have under the law, or because we don’t trust in them. Sometimes we don’t remember the details because we black them out. Sometimes we go out partying then go home and cry ourselves to sleep. Sometimes we get up and go to work and it’s a nightmare. Sometimes we make it to a comedy night and some graphic rape joke means we run out of the room to have a panic attack. Maybe we don’t actually think our grief or pain is any of your business. It isn’t your business. It’s private.

And hey, you know something else? Sometimes we pick ourselves up and get on with life. Just like we’re told we should. It’s almost as if we’re three dimensional human beings, not caricatures. We’re always being told to stop being so hysterical and sensitive, to just get over things and move on. But if we actually try to do that, you use it against us.

Of course I’m against rape, who isn’t, sigh, this is boring, in fact it’s quite offensive to suggest I wouldn’t be! The term ‘rape culture’? That’s offensive to men! It suggests we’re all rapists!

Oh, really? You’re offended? You are? It offends you that I don’t automatically know you’re not a rapist? Because you’re so nice and Nice Guys, Decent Guys, are never rapists? Is that it?

Guess what. As nice as you may be, I don’t know that you’re not a rapist.

Here’s the irony of this one. I hate rape culture. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt. I believe rape is not normal, and rapists choose to rape. I believe it is reasonable to assume someone will not rape you. I believe they are at fault if they do.

But the problem with believing that is, if I, believing you not to be a rapist, which is a fair assumption because you’re probably not, treat you like a Decent Non-Rapist, and get drunk in your presence, dance with you, come back to chill at your house, fall asleep near you, have sex with you consensually then sleep in a bed with you, date you, have a relationship with you, or any number of other things, and then you rape me, it turns out that it is my fault for not assuming you were a rapist, and these things can be used against me.

So if you don’t like it, don’t blame me. I’m on your side. These aren’t my rules. Blame the people who keep telling me that treating you like a Decent Non-Rapist is the same as consenting to sex.

Because ultimately, if you find the assumption that you aren’t automatically against rape offensive, then you should find rape culture (or whatever you want to call it) offensive. So let’s work together. When Decent Non-Rapists all stop demanding that rape be defined in a way that excludes as many traumatic incidents as possible, when men stop covering each other’s tracks, when you stop defending Ken Clarke because you somehow believe raping a woman you’ve dated or married isn’t quite as serious or dangerous as raping a stranger, and his clumsy words give you cover to say so, when you understand that maybe people are not, actually entirely 100% anti-rape if they watch, enjoy, and celebrate porn that depicts rape, when that shit gets sorted, maybe I will be able to stop boring you with my tedious observations about how this all looks from my perspective. And maybe I will even stop getting so upset with you when you tell me your perfectly innocent opinions about rape.

2 MINUTE RANT: In Britain, complaining is patriotic

In Britain, complaining is patriotic

It really is, you know. It’s how we show our love. Sarcasm, grumbling, and saying everything with one eyebrow raised is basically how we get our jollies in this country. Well, that, and eating chips – although not Macdonalds fries, because they, whilst largely considered to be perfectly tasty, are not what any self-respecting Brit would consider a chip. Fries are what Americans eat with their cheeseburgers. Chips are big chunky yummy things you eat in the pub with a pint while you’re sheltering from the rain because your umbrella turned inside out in the wind and hit you in the eye while you were waiting for a bus.

If cynical moaning offends you, then you’re living in the wrong country.

Even so, our esteemed Mayor of London Boris has joined the growing list of voices insisting that we must, we must, we absolutely bloody well must on all accounts have a good time during the Olympics, and if we don’t like it we can belt up and stop our “whingeing.”

Does he know what country he’s in? This is not America. They do enthusiasm on tap extremely well. Neither is this France or Italy. We don’t get passionate, we don’t show our emotions. Well, unless we’re drunk and someone cuts ahead of us in the queue for a kebab and chips. (If you’re coming for the Olympics, by the way, you might like to note, that fries, rather than proper chunky chips, are acceptable under these debauched desperate circumstances. They have a greater surface area and therefore a greater potential for oil and grease, which is how we make up for the fact that we don’t really ever put any seasoning or flavouring besides salt on any of our foods. That’s right! There’s method in the madness!)

Ed West wrote in the Daily Telegraph today about the Olympics, calling for us to give the whole thing a “big British welcome.” West is something of an expert on American culture but we are British, and, well, what does he think we’re doing? This is how we welcome people in Britain. We sneer, mock, deride and complain. At ourselves, of course, not at the people coming here; they are all absolutely welcome. We’re just a bit baffled about why they’re bothering, and, because we’re actually a rather considerate nation (despite our best efforts to pretend otherwise to ourselves and the rest of the world), we think it’s fair to make sure everyone has reasonable expectations of what Britain is like before they experience their first rail replacement service. So, tourists: it will rain. The tube will break at least once. You won’t meet the Queen. You won’t meet Prince Harry. You won’t see any bowler hats. We don’t talk like Hugh Grant. Most of us talk in sounds rather than clear words, usually with our mouths full of beer-battered cod, as well. But we’re nice, and we are, in spite of all appearances, genuinely rather flattered that you’re coming.

In fact, as whingeing goes, we’ve been remarkably low level about it, considering that there are a lot of things to whinge about, and how much we love to do it.

I mean, corporate sponsorship isn’t exactly the decline of moral civilisation as we know it but when we read that Adidas are allowed to place subliminal advertising in primary schools, presented to look like an official instruction, for a state event, while at the same time reading about a local butchers which is facing legal action after depicting sausages shaped like Olympic rings on a poster, we can’t help but smell the foul scent of killjoy corporatism.

And when LOCOG basically demand that no-one links them online if they’re saying anything negative, they can’t be surprised if people get riled up and irritated. It’s like the episode of The Office where David Brent demands that the staff come and “have a laugh” in the pub with him then gets upset when he finds out that no-one likes him. Brits are not all grumpy, we’re not miserable, we’re not joyless. Look how well we coped with the riots. (By we, I mean the hundreds of Londoners who cleaned up London and made tea for the coppers, obviously; I don’t mean our elected leaders, several of whom were off on their holidays and loathe to come back.) In fact most of us are perfectly cheerful and perfectly humorous. We just don’t like being told when to be cheerful, or which powerful figures we’re allowed to make fun of.

But it’s not just a matter of being treated like children by the Olympic authorities. Being treated like a child is annoying and a bit humiliating, but we can live with it. On the other hand, being treated like a potential criminal every time you walk through London Bridge station is actually a little tiny bit frightening. It’s not something we’re used to in Britain, having these armed police with enormous machine guns standing around, giving us suspicious glances if we curse, cry or blink at the wrong time during our daily commute. (Commutes are stressful. I’m a fairly peaceful person but I can’t account for the numbers that would be slain in my wake by now if I’d had a gun at my fingertips during every tube journey at rush hour.)

It doesn’t help to see the results of the Ian Tomlinson case in the news this week, either. If that’s what is considered acceptable policing in the middle of a rather standard, reasonably peaceful, protest, what will be considered acceptable levels of force during an event like the Olympics? What will happen if some hapless man is wandering around in the wrong place at the wrong time again? This is not America. They trust guns in America. They shoot terrorists, they shoot animals, and they shoot each other. But this is Britain. We have riots where looters stand in queues to steal bottles of water. Guns are alien to us.

Some people would say that all this is astonishingly unBritish. Some people would say that there is another word for using the powers of the state to promote corporate interests and vice versa. It’s an ugly word, and it begins with F.

Obviously fascism is a ridiculously hyperbolic and silly word to use in conjunction with Britain in any context and all things considered I’m still actually quite excited about the Olympics; the new faces around London, the inspirational role models for young people, the boost for human aspiration, the tourism revenues, the whole caboodle. Buckle me up, I’m ready and buzzing. But when I see state sponsored corporate advertising, and corporations telling children what to wear in order to attend a state event that politicians tell you not to criticise, when I see local butchers being told how to arrange their sausage posters and soldiers being brought in to do the work of security services after police jobs have been cut and a heap of public money has been spent on outsourcing that work to the private sector which fumbled it like a bad penalty, well, sorry to disappoint Boris but I’m afraid that if I feel like “whingeing” about any or all of that, then you know what? I bloody well will do.

Perhaps this is why Len McLuskey called upon everyone to engage in mass civil disobedience to disrupt the event. Is it really British to use primary schools for subliminal advertising? Is it British to attempt a ban on authentic English chips? Is it British to draft professional soldiers in to protect the Olympic park and then make them pay £1 for a shower? Is it British to tell local butchers how to arrange their sausages? I don’t think so. Brits understand fair play, queuing, irreverence and irony. We mock things to show that we embrace them as ours.

It’s not just the Olympics. We mock the Royal Family. We mock our sports stars, even when they do brilliantly. We even mock fish and chips. If we mock the games, it’s a compliment. You’re up there with fish and chips in our hearts. Global companies with special tax exemptions, and detached, wealthy politicians who enjoy a decidedly different lifestyle from most of the rest of us, well, perhaps they don’t get this, but the reason people are disappointed by the handling of the Olympics is because it’s actually become a thoroughly unBritish affair. It’s not just a matter of being po-faced about the games. On the contrary, people are sad because something that hundreds and hundreds of Brits have been genuinely excited about for a really long time is turning into an oppressive, killjoy, taxpayer-funded binge of corporate advertising, with diktats, and an authoritarian instruction to Have Fun on Command by the State.

Frankly, Boris is the one who should stop whingeing. In fact, he should count himself lucky that all we’re bothering to complain about, in the midst of all this, is the weather and the transport. But then, that’s what you’d expect from us. After all, we’re British.

Dear Labour party

Ed Miliband has had his clause IV moment. Apparently. He’s standing up to the GMB Union (well, kind of) in their recent motion to ban (sort of) the Blairite organisatiion Progress, from the Labour party. Or something.

It’s very important to the Labour party. They’ve all been bickering about it on twitter for days. Well, that, and the call Brown did or didn’t have with Murdoch where he threatened ‘war.’ Guido Fawkes has reported that Peter Mandelson told him the call did happen. (You can see why, after months of telling people how pointless and irrelevant Leveson was, a whole pile of Guido Fawkes types have suddenly decided it’s interesting after all, can’t you?) The Cabinet Office seemed to confirm Brown’s story that it didn’t. And now, Alistair Campbell’s diaries are explaining the details of the ego sandpit-slaps between Blair, Brown and Balls. Stop the presses! Apparently Blair said Brown was “brilliant, ambitious, and bonkers!” Well done you, Labour. You’ve really got your PR pants on straight, haven’t you? I mean, if the personal fighting of Mandelson, Brown, the GMB Union and Progress doesn’t get you rocking in excitement then what will.

Presumably every time Labour activists are on the doorstep voters say: “well, I do hope you’ve decided what your position is on Purple Book?” Or, “Personally, I find that ‘In The Black Labour’ is much more convincing than Blue Labour. Apparently there’s something called Orange Labour but I’ve never liked the colour Orange. I hope your next manifesto comes out with a striped cover. That would make me vote for you. This is all very important to me. And please make sure you denounce that think tank Progress. They are funded by pharmaceutical companies and they are similar to that group Militant from way back when. Would you like a cup of tea?”

Watching the Labour party at the moment is like watching a drunken fish trying to climb a tree. I say this with all the greatest of respect: what the bloody hell is the party doing? I mean, on the day Stephen Hester got his unpopular, controversial bonus, Ed Miliband made a speech about chocolate oranges, thus reminding everybody of why they actually all bloody well love capitalism; instant access to cheap tasty chocolate being a key plus. When the budget proved a (rather foreseeable) public relations disaster for George Osborne, the Labour party managed to make themselves almost sound even worse than the government as they struggled to articulate what they would actually do instead, repeating the line about the 50p rate of tax cut being a tax cut for millionaires (even though the top rate starts at £150,000) and then refusing to commit to reinstating it anyway. When it emerged that unpaid Jubilee stewards were left to pitch tents under a bridge at 3am, John Prescott and Tom Watson spoke up about it, but the Labour leader? Did he denounce it as an example of this ‘irresponsible capitalism’ he made a speech about? Because taxpayers’ money subsiding free workers in terrible conditions is a somewhat better example of irresponsible capitalism than selling a cheap chocolate orange, surely? Did he stand up for those unpaid workers? No. He made a speech about the importance of being English.

Not that his Englishness speech bored everyone. It prompted a lovely squabbling match amongst Labour activists about whether the left should talk about nationalism more. It’s true that the Labour party have lost a lot of voters to the BNP because of their immigration policies which were seen as too lax, and whether that’s fair or not, they were certainly chaotic and poorly defined. But they also lost a lot to the Liberal Democrats over Iraq and civil liberties, something they would, in spite of the Liberal Democrats’ single digit polling, do well to keep in mind.

The Labour party’s problem isn’t that they’re not talking about Englishness enough, any more than their problem is that they aren’t saying enough to denounce unions like GMB, or that voters are associating them with Progress. It’s funny that the same voices aching over whether investigations into possible corruption like Leveson and even issues like equal marriage are relevant to what they patronisingly call ‘ordinary people’ outside the ‘Westminster village’ or the ‘metropolitan elites’ (a painfully self-regarding argument that can go and piss on itself, frankly) are pulling their pants down and getting comfy on the sofa over arguments about a possible ban which won’t happen anyway on a group most people have actually never heard of within Labour.

It’s not that the party doesn’t need to resolve the Tony Blair problem – or, more specifically, the Iraq problem. As long as that war is bloodying the map and gobbling up human lives, they will have to beg hard for forgiveness. They may never get it. There are people who can’t forgive Thatcher for her divisive policies. I don’t think I can really forgive the Tories who voted through Section 28. And it strikes me that although some of those Labour politicians who voted for the war like Andy Burnham, or those like Ed Balls who say they supported it at the time but “would be against it if they knew then what they know now” voted ‘very strongly’ against any kind of an inquiry into it, and ultimately, accepted Tony Blair as leader because, like it or not, they were elected on his coattails. They aren’t going to win back many of those votes by flicking peas at each other over the dinner table. They’ll get back our votes by acting as if they know how to run the country.

A sensible, alternative economic policy would be a good start. Labour have said they can’t promise to reverse Tory cuts, won’t reinstate the 50p tax rate, and  aren’t going to protect public sector pay. They won’t stand up for strikers or make any constructive criticisms about the Welfare Reform Bill. They won’t explain properly whether they actually support the Lib Dem policy initiative of raising the personal tax threshold. Would they put these taxes back up against for the poorest if elected? After all, this is the party that scrapped the 10p tax rate. It’s too much to expect a fully calculated budget years before a general election but it’s not too much to expect them to actually criticise the coalition budget in a coherent, consistent way, especially when it presented such a gaping own goal for them.

People like leaders who have confidence. Most people don’t know how the economy can be fixed. Even experts don’t agree. Most people like to think the treasury is run by someone who knows, vaguely, what they’re doing. George Osborne isn’t getting results, but his dogmatic confidence is overwhelming. When it comes down to it, an awful lot of people will instinctively feel safer with someone who has an arrogant swagger than someone who can’t make up their own mind about what they think.

Sometimes the Labour party give the impression that the fun and games of politics is of more interest than running the country. That’s all well and good for a while but the country actually deserves a decent Labour party with workable economic policies and a strong, credible voice against stark-staring injustices like workfare. With affection in my voice I say to the Labour party that they all need to be hit with a stick and kicked up the backside. Come on. Don’t make me vote Liberal Democrat again.